Venice grad wins award for structure meant to reverse global warming

When asked whether his almost science fiction-like ideas for the future will ever be feasible, architect Derek Pirozzi mentions the 19th century writer Jules Verne.

In the 1860s, Verne fascinated his fans with then seemingly impossible tales of men rocketing to the moon. As NASA later proved, Verne's imagination turned out to be a century ahead of his time.

Perhaps Pirozzi may be the Jules Verne of architects. This month, he received international recognition for his idea for a massive, moveable Arctic research lab that, hypothetically, could reverse global warming.

“Is it feasible? I don't see how it would be infeasible in the next several decades,” Pirozzi, 27, said. “Who knows? Look how much we have developed from 100 years ago.”

Pirozzi, a graduate of Venice High School and the University of South Florida, earned first place in the architecture magazine eVolo's latest annual competition for “outstanding ideas for vertical living.”

The International Skyscraper Competition received 625 projects from 83 countries.

“He was very proud to represent the United States,” his mother, Donna Pirozzi of Nokomis, said.

The second and third place winners are from France and China respectively.

As a boy growing up in the Venice area, Pirozzi knew he wanted to build things.

“He was always interested in architecture,” his mother remembers. “When he was about 7 or 8, he would draw house plans. He was always into Legos.”

Pirozzi's first and futuristic submission to the eVolo competition is surely no Lego house. It dazzled the judges by taking 21st century architecture to a new level — the Arctic, to be specific.

“As a Florida native, ideas and concepts involving passive cooling methods are a constant feature in my design proposals,” said Pirozzi, who works for the Olson Kundig architecture firm in Seattle.

Pirozzi presented a design for his “Polar Umbrella,” a moveable research facility made of steel and other materials that he thinks could help preserve the polar ice caps.

“We must begin to cool the Earth's surface once again by reducing heat gain in our vulnerable arctic regions,” said Pirozzi, who believes melting polar ice could cause “far-reaching global climate change.”

Pirozzi designed a buoyant, modular structure with “the core and certain fabricated elements built off site, then assembled in place.”

The structure would be immense, its diameter equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building and its height about half that of the Manhattan landmark. Pirozzi sees several of them being built, installed and moved around the polar ice caps.

Each structure would feature an immense, umbrella-shaped canopy that would reduce the warming effect of sunlight on the Arctic surface below.

A polyethylene piping system within the canopy would pump salt water and expose it to sunlight.

“The vast abundance of salt water is used to produce a renewable source of electricity through the osmotic power facility housed within the core,” Pirozzi said.

Dredged ocean water would be frozen and returned to thicken the ice caps around the structure's base.

Pirozzi's vision for this remote power plant and freezer gets even more extensive. He says the mushroom-shaped structure with a desalination plant could include research facilities, perhaps staffed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as dormitory-style housing. It could even generate revenue as an eco-tourism attraction.

Whether Pirozzi's vision becomes a reality even he cannot predict. Having just started his job in Seattle two months ago, Pirozzi has no immediate plans to pitch his concept elsewhere. Now that it has caught the attention of his profession around the world, though, it could get other minds working along similar lines.

Meanwhile, Pirozzi keeps thinking not about the Great White North but of Florida.

He is engaged to Mallory Brandow, who also attended Venice High and USF and is now teaching in Tampa. His mother works for the Venice Chamber of Commerce and his father, Dennis, at the Venice Post Office.

“The Gulf Coast of Florida will always be my home,” Pirozzi said. “In the near future, I intend to move back to the Sarasota area to start my own office. . . . It is my life's goal and ambition to come back to the area and bring a style of design that becomes a distinct Florida vernacular.”

Given all the sunlight, sand and surf around here, one wonders what unique, self-sustaining prototype for Florida's future Pirozzi could come up with next.

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